International donors pledged an additional $200 million yesterday to fund the African Union peacekeeping operation in Sudan's western Darfur region during a conference to discuss the ongoing violence. Canada made the largest new pledge, promising $134 million. The State Department's senior representative on Sudan, Charles Snyder, said Washington was adding an additional $50 million to the $95 million already pledged to end what he called "acts of genocide" in the ongoing conflict.The AU has 2,270 peacekeepers in western Sudan trying to stop the fighting between rebels and Arab militias. The AU plans to increase that number of troops to more than 12,300. The organization has asked for $723 million to help finance and equip the Darfur operation, but was $350 million short at the beginning of yesterday's conference. Snyder said the violence in Darfur was slowing, but that the only way to end it was to deploy a large AU force supported by NATO. "The truth is the AU was looking for outside support and when you are looking at support on this kind of scale we need an organization that can do it, such as NATO," Snyder told the Associated Press in the Ethiopian capital.